Lecture given at Sciences Po, Paris, 5 April 2016, with Jonathan Gray.

1. The Rise of Data Journalism:
The Making of Journalistic
Knowledge through
Quantification
5 April 2016,Sciences Po, Paris, France
Liliana Bounegru | lilianabounegru.org | @bb_liliana
Jonathan Gray | jonathangray.org | @jwyg

2. Jonathan Gray Liliana Bounegru

3. Data Journalism MOOCThe Data Journalism Handbook
Data Journalism News Trainings, Conferences and Workshops

4. Digital Methods Initiative
http://digitalmethods.net

6. Data Worlds:
The New Politics of
Public Information
Jonathan Gray

7. “Wikileaks didn't invent data journalism. But it did
give newsrooms a reason to adopt it. There was
just too much data for it to happen any other way.”
Simon Rogers, The Guardian Datablog

10. What is in this 2.6 terabyte leak?
11.5 million documents
4.8 million emails
3 million database entries
2 million PDF documents
1 million images
320,000 text documents
214,488 offshore entities
14,153 different clients
200+ countries involved
21 offshore jurisdictions

11. Over 370 journalists from
109 different media organisations
in 76 different countries
collaborating for nearly 2 years.

12. (And we are only on day 2 of 14!)

16. The so-called “data revolution” and the
“transparency revolution” have given rise to
new journalism practises rooted in data,
quantitative methods and computational
techniques.

17. These practises are transforming not only
the way news is sourced, produced and
delivered but also who and what is doing
the sourcing, production and delivery of
journalism.

18. New York Times Interac2ve News and Graphics teams Chicago Tribune News Apps team
Guardian Interac-ve Team “Journalism Unicorn”
“There is something about not just being able to think and act like a programmer but also to be able to
think and act like a journalist, which is quite demanding. […] Newsrooms are crying out for these
skills.” (Emily Bell, Professor & Director, Tow Center for Digital Journalism, ‘Columbia is launching a new
post-bac program to breed journalism unicorns’, Nieman Lab, 2013)

19. Source: Alan McClean, New York Times

20. Source: Alan McClean, New York Times

21. The programmer-
journalists
The computer-assisted
reporters
The data journalists

22. Three Kinds of Data Journalism

23. 1. Pu&ng news into context with data
http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/oct/31/europe-unemployment-rate-by-country-eurozone

24. The Guardian Datablog: Journalism as a Source of Data
“Most of what we do is this kind of very newsy, quick pieces of data journalism, that are based around stories that just happen to be in the news that day. Every news story
has some data behind it and we’re here to make that accessible and surface it.” (interview with Simon Rogers, 6 September 2012)
“When we launched the Datablog, we thought the audiences would be developers building applicaCons. In fact, it’s people wanCng to know more about carbon emissions or
Eastern European immigraCon or the breakdown of deaths in Afghanistan — or even the number of Cmes the Beatles used the word ‘love’ in their songs.” (Rogers, Simon. 2012.
“Behind the scenes at The Guardian Datablog.” In The Data Journalism Handbook, edited by Gray, Jonathan, Liliana Bounegru, and Lucy Chambers, 34-37. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly Media)

25. The Guardian Datablog: Journalism as a Source of Data

26. 2. Data-driven investigative journalism

27. 3. News apps as research tools for journalists and audiences
“By showing each reader data that is specific to them,
a news app can help each reader understand a story in
a way that’s personally meaningful to them. It can help
a reader understand their personal connecCon to a
broad naConal phenomenon, and help them aNach
what they know to what they don’t know, and thereby
encourage a deep understanding of abstract concepts.”
(Klein, S. (2012). News apps at ProPublica. In J. Gray, L.
Bounegru, & L. Chambers (Eds.), The data journalism
handbook (pp. 185-186). Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly
Media)

28. Why Does Data Journalism Matter?

29. –Emily Bell, Professor & Director, Tow Center for Digital
Journalism, 2012
“One of the most important questions for journalism’s
sustainability will be how individuals and organizations
respond to this availability of data.”

30. “Data-driven journalism is the future.”
–Tim Berners-Lee, founder of the World Wide Web, 2012

31. New forms of gathering informa-on, new forms of knowledge
produc-on, new forms of presenta-on and dissemina-on of stories.
Why Does Data Journalism Matter?

32. "Anybody that thinks that this race is
anything but a toss-up right now is
such an ideologue, they should be
kept away from typewriters, computers,
laptops and microphones for the next
10 days, because they're jokes.”
(Joe Scarborough, MSNBC, 2012)
“I am Nate Silver,
Lord and God of the
Algorithm”
(Jon Stewart, 2012)
Geeks vs. pundits: clash of two epistemological cultures?

33. New forms of knowledge
“Part of what we’ve been trained, as a society,
to expect out of the Big Deal Journalis]c Story is
something “new,” something we didn’t know
before. Nixon was a crook! Osama Bin Laden
was found by the CIA and then allowed to
escape! But in these recent stories, it’s not the
presence of something new, but the ability to
tease a paNern out of a lot of liNle things we
already know that’s the big deal. It’s not
the newsness of failure; . . . it’s the weight of
failure.”
(C.W. Anderson, assistant professor in the Department
of Media Culture at the College of Staten Island, 2010)

34. It is said to improve the democratic function of the
media:
• enhancing journalistic objectivity
• more accountable journalism
• more efficient journalism workflows
• increasing citizen participation in public life
Why Does Data Journalism Matter?

35. “At The Texas Tribune … the data sets account for 75 percent of the site’s overall traffic.” (Columbia
Journalism Review, 2010)
Potential for the media as a business
Why Does Data Journalism Matter?

36. Time on page substantially higher than on other sections of the Guardian (Simon Rogers, former
Data Blog editor)

37. Is Data journalism New?

38. Data journalism wasn’t born yesterday

39. John Snow’s map of cholera outbreaks
in 19th century London

40. Social survey movement in 1900s

41. Precision journalism in 1960s

42. Source: Alex Howard

44. Emergence of term “data journalism” in 2000s.
“For example, say a newspaper has written a story about a local
fire. Being able to read that story on a cell phone is fine and
dandy. Hooray, technology! But what I really want to be able
to do is explore the raw facts of that story, one by one, with
layers of attribution, and an infrastructure for comparing the
details of the fire — date, time, place, victims, fire station
number, distance from fire department, names and years
experience of firemen on the scene, time it took for firemen
to arrive — with the details of previous fires. And subsequent
fires, whenever they happen.”
(Adrian Holovaty, 2006, “A fundamental way newspaper sites
need to change”)

45. The profile of the data journalism team

46. Source: Cindy Royal, 2013, niemanlab.org

47. data journalism in the
newsroom
Lone
rangers:
Guardian
Datablog
Two-person
team:
Guardian US
Small-scale
team:
WNYC
Large team:
New York
Times
Source: Simon Rogers, datajournalismcourse.net

48. Data journalism outside the newsroom

49. Computational journalism in universities

50. Data journalism and computer-assisted
reporting in the NGO sector

51. Data Journalism Handbook: http://datajournalismhandbook.org/

52. Data Journalism Handbook: http://datajournalismhandbook.org/

53. http://towcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Tow-Center-Data-
Driven-Journalism.pdf

54. School of Data: http://schoolofdata.org/

55. Data Journalism Awards: https://www.globaleditorsnetwork.org/programmes/data-journalism-awards/

56. Who sponsors us?
Who funds data journalism?

57. How do you study data journalism?

58. How have these recent developments been
discussed in academic literature?
“Could computing technology - which has played no small part in the decline
of the traditional news media - turn out to be a saviour of journalism’s
watchdog tradition?” (Cohen, Sarah, Chengkai Li, Jun Yang, and Cong Yu.
2011. "Computational Journalism: A Call to Arms to Database Researchers."
CIDR 2011: 148-151)
“If there’s a silver lining in this situation, it is the ability of computer scientists
to strengthen the hands of the remaining professional reporters and engage
new players in the watchdog process” (Cohen, Sarah, James F. Hamilton,
and Fred Turner. 2011. “Computational journalism.” Communications of the
ACM 54 (10): 66-71)

59. Flew, T., Spurgeon, C., Daniel, A., & Swift, A. (2012). The
promise of computational journalism.
Cohen, S., Li, C., Yang, J., & Yu, C. (2011). Computational
journalism: A call to arms to database researchers
Hamilton, J. & Turner F. (July, 2009). Accountability through
algorithm: Developing the field of computational journalism.
How have these recent developments been
discussed in academic literature?

60. Royal, Cindy. 2010. “The Journalist as Programmer: a Case Study
of the New York Times Interactive News Technology Department.”
Presented at the International Symposium on Online Journalism,
Austin, Texas.
Parasie, Sylvain, and Eric Dagiral. 2012. ‘‘Data-driven Journalism
and the Public Good: ‘Computer-assisted-reporters’ and
‘Programmer-journalists’ in Chicago.’’ New Media & Society 15 (6):
853-871.
How have these recent developments been
discussed in academic literature?

61. List of academic literature on data journalism
hap://lilianabounegru.org/2014/05/07/list-of-academic-papers-
about-data-journalism-and-computa]onal-journalism/

62. If stage one of data journalism
was 'find and scrape data',
then stage two was 'ask
government agencies to
release data' in easy to use
formats. Stage three is going
to be “'make your own data'.
How about data sources?
Javaun Moradi, Product Manager, NPR
Whose voices and viewpoints structure and inform news discourse
goes to the heart of democratic views of, and radical concerns
about, the news media. (Simon Cottle, 2003)
Sourcing practices

63. Bounegru, L. “What Data Journalists Need to Do Differently.” Harvard Business Review.
https://hbr.org/2014/05/what-data-journalists-need-to-do-differently/

64. “…when journalists are building their stories exclusively
around existing data collected by a small number of major
institutions and companies, this may exacerbate the
tendency to amplify issues already considered a priority,
and to downplay those that have been relegated or which
aren’t on the radar screens of major institutions.”
–Bounegru, L. “What Data Journalists Need to Do
Differently.” Harvard Business Review, 2014

65. Sourcing questions
• To what extent do we see new sourcing practices
and new processes of journalistic knowledge
production emerging?
• How do these new processes compare with
traditional sourcing practices?
• How do these allegedly innovative and
transformative practices and processes of sourcing
and knowledge production shape the democratic
function of the media?

66. Knowledge production questions
• How can data journalism be understood as part of
the broader computational culture that permeates
our societies?
• How does data journalism reconfigure traditional
journalism epistemologies?
• How are audiences configured in this process?

67. [END]